grow nuts (or don’t)

Women’s embarrassing adolescent and wistful fantasies are not like ours, now are they? Women aren’t fantasizing about swooping into some lonely, downtrodden, and invisible schmuck’s life and throwing him a much-needed life preserver. You’re not Ralph Machio in the Karate Kid or John Cusack standing outside Ione Skye’s window with the proverbial boom box. There’s no Elizabeth Shue who is going to dress your wounds and comfort you after you get your ass beat by the bully or who is going to believe in you while you wax on and off with Mr. Miyagi in preparation for your crowd-pleasing comeback.

All those women you remember from popular entertainment who eventually get panty gravy for the underdog when he finally proves himself were written by men, not women. Men who were mostly dorks, like you. They’re fantasy women concocted by clueless suckers like yourself who projected into the culture idealized women as we would like to believe they are, not women as they actually are. What was a source of hope for you in your early adolescence was only ever destined to become anachronistic “tropes,” predictable targets for the oh-so-clever snark of boring feminist hipsters who couldn’t give a flying fuck about your “man feelz” because they regard your fears, aspirations, insecurities, and very existence as either a dire threat at worst or a joke at best.

In real life, Elizabeth Shue is disgusted, repelled, and embarrassed by your weakness when you get your ass beat or are humiliated by jocks with superior karate kills and she regards your need of her approval and support as an irritating obligation. She isn’t in your corner and supporting you when you’re bested by life’s various villains and bullies, but is instead giving the bully a handjob in the back of the sports car his parents bought him while you take the bus back home where you’ll cry into your pillow like a little bitch. In real life Ione Skye thinks you’re a fucking loser for not having a job or ambition and she’s calling the cops because she thinks you’re a desperate, unattractive stalker if you show up outside her window playing what is a really shitty Peter Gabriel song anyway. She doesn’t appreciate the courage it takes to risk socially, put your head on the chopping block, and give the object of your hope the option to lop it off or to pardon you for the crime of wanting to be with her or wanting her to notice you. At best you’re a story she can laugh about with her moronic friends, an excuse to brag about being stalker worthy, proof that she has the power to exclude and reject needy men whose attention she regards as a particularly funny joke.

Women in real life are not getting hot and bothered at the thought of finding some supplicating and lonely workhorse who will arrange his whole life around them because he’s so starved for attention and so appreciative of the extremely conditional duty sex she doles out as a matter of obligation. Women don’t know or care that you spent most of your life trying to qualify for them or that you’d take a bullet for them if they were in danger. They often have no idea that the guy in their life wants to open the jar or deal with the potentially sexist auto mechanic because they want to feel as if they are needed in some way by a woman, who like most women, can more easily replace him than he can replace her. They would find your little adolescent dreams of The One, the soulmate, who finally sees and appreciates “the real you” because she isn’t “superficial” to be repellent, corny, and worthy of a laugh.

If you’re the average guy and she’s the average girl, rest assured she doesn’t need you the way you need her.

For most of us, women’s attention is valuable because it is hard fought and won or lost, but for them, male attention – your attention – is cheap, abundant, taken for granted, and often an annoyance. What for you was a humiliating rejection which periodically haunts your thinking when you least expect it and forever hobbles your self confidence no matter how hard you try to forget it was for her a minor annoyance, a joke, one that was quickly forgotten five minutes after it occurred. “Man up,” son, nobody gives a shit, least of all her. You can chuck all that adolescent longing and Disney movie bullshit in the trash. None of them are terribly interested in your sensitivity or the little feelz you’re going to confess to them in the middle of the night or in a moment of doubt because you were stupid enough to think that you were allowed to “just be yourself.” They don’t care about the lifetime of longing for the approval of the one girl whose unconditional love you imagined would erase every failure, slight, or humiliation and would inspire in you a devotion so fierce and unyielding that you would gladly spend the rest of your life slaving away to build a life with her and make her happy. She doesn’t care because she was too busy fantasizing about having quasi-rape sex with wealthy and powerful sociopaths in endless variations on the trite bodice ripper “romance” novel that women have been flicking their beans to for generations.

You’re projecting your own desires on to them in the mistaken belief that they’ll be reciprocated, valued, or even recognized for what they are. What you imagine is the happy ending to this unfortunate chapter in your little life narrative – the corny, climactic resolution of the conflict when you finally overcome all odds and find a woman who extends to you the devotion and unconditional love that you yourself are all too ready to give – to her feels like being asked to be somebody’s mother, begrudgingly grant a pity fuck, or slip a five into some desperate wino’s change cup because he cornered her somewhere. That sympathy, empathy, and unconditional love is reserved for her son, if she should have one, not for you.

One wonders what “intimacy” is possible when all that is genuine, authentically-felt, and best in you has to be tucked away and hidden lest you offend her hunter gatherer daddy issues libido and cause her sacred vagina to dry up. You really have to wonder what’s in it for you other than sex, which is hardly worth the perpetual uphill battle you’ll wage to win it or the tremendous and increasing risk it now comes saddled with. What else is she even capable of offering? It’s like a really demanding and shitty minimum wage job. Why would you expend so much energy on winning the affection of somebody so cruel, ignorant, and petty that she isn’t even capable of recognizing you as a human being but instead regards you as a status marker, extra, or prop in the tired and predictable soap opera she calls existence?

You would think it would get old pretending to be the outcome independent, carefree, forever smirking dudebro alpha cad who is just looking to have a good time with a cool chick during the perpetual jam band solo of his awesome life because he’s a winner. What is the fucking point of any of this? There’s nothing fun or fulfilling about it. It’s exhausting, lonely, and depressing dancing like a monkey on a stick for her benefit because she “likes to laugh and have fun” all the time, like she’s a goddamn child and you’re the clown that her parents hired for the princess’s birthday party. It’s ghastly. How can things be like this? How did this even happen?